


Grasshopper Pie

by wild_west_wind



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark Academia, Horror, Paleontology, Spooky, and it is probably obvious I didn't put much thought into it, and it's not dark academia other than the general sense of those in academia being in a nasty spot, but it's outside and they're all wearing cheap outdoor gear, cw blood, cw violence, grad students, it's a messy little thing, originial horror, scientists - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26328670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wild_west_wind/pseuds/wild_west_wind
Summary: In the hills above the town of Grasshopper, where once monsters roamed the earth, something lies beneath the ground. Not quite dead, but not quite alive. Hungry.(A little short story I banged out in a day. I don't like it.)(Overall there's a lot I'd like to change, but this is an exercise for me in saying "That's good enough," rather than lamenting over multiple versions of the same story.)Enjoy! Or not! I'm not the boss of you.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 124





	Grasshopper Pie

**Grasshopper Pie**

About an hour north of Billings there’s a little town framed in a hollow by rocks as bright green as avocado flesh. Twenty people live there, give or take. Once there was a glacier nearby, full of dead grasshoppers, slowly melting, quickly rotting as they fell from their icy tomb. Free, finally, but only for a moment.

They called this town Grasshopper.

A dirty black truck rolled down Grasshopper’s main street, mostly empty, lined with forgotten storefronts. A milliner only identifiable from the painted sign on the brick side wall of a slumping building. An assay office, windows broken, stood beside the very much open general store. A diner flicked off it’s lights down the way. Much to Amaya Zigor’s dismay, they closed for lunch.

In the sagebrush speckled hills above Grasshopper, a group of students set up camp. Between open sided tents and awnings lay broad pits. In the green soil lay black fragments of bones. Long dead. Unlike the grasshoppers in the long-gone glacier, these would not rot. They already had.

Amaya pulled her truck up to the dig site, and backed it up. Fresh supplies in her back seat. Enough beer to drown a horse in her cooler. She wasn’t thinking about that, she wasn’t thinking about how her ice cream was melting in her plastic grocery bag, seeping into her upholstery. She was thinking about the fossils, the rocks. She was thinking they were wrong.

In the hills above Grasshopper, Montana, there were fossils. Bones of dinosaurs, bones of small reptiles. One damaged, but more-or-less articulated wing from an Azhdarchid that Jacob, a new student in the lab, was certain can be identified to the genus _Quetzalcoatlus_ , which would have been cause enough to justify the night’s drinking if he hadn’t been full of shit.

Amaya sat down over the edge of one of their pits. Exposed in the upheaved earth, was a narrow bank of glassy black earth. Below it bone fragments. Above it, more bone fragments. Above that, the physical boundary marking the end of the Cretaceous, and the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. There were two impacts here, separated by centuries at least. Probably millennia. The fossils below the older impact were jumbled. Impact assemblages, she and her labmates were certain, but even those were odd. The taphonomy was strange. Bones died jet black, but in every fragment, every hollow, grew bright blue minerals, large and irregular crystal forms with no appreciable cleavage. The running guess was the mineral chalcanthite, but it was much too hard for a fingernail to scratch. In truth, no one, not even Dr. Lee, had the slightest idea what was going on here.

Amaya Zigor was certain that, however this dig ended, she and her lab wound either be the stars of the next Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference (next year in sunny Brisbane), or complete laughing stocks for their outrageous publications. Either way, she would leave Montana with a PhD, and folks would know her name.

A jolt ran up Amaya’s back, and she nearly fell into the pit, as Dr. Lee rested a heavy hand on her shoulder. His round face framed by long sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses.

“Amaya,” he said smiling, “You’ve been sitting here for half an hour.”

Amaya took a deep breath, and forced out a pale imitation of a laugh, “I have a lot to think about.”

“Don’t we all!” he said, sitting beside her, a little too close, “Have you seen pit three today? Shayna has been finding some excellent crocodilian material over there. Mostly osteoderms and teeth, but enough to diagnose a species I’m sure.”

Amaya didn’t respond. Lee was overly fond of Shayna. The whole lab knew they were fucking. The fossils in the ground knew they were fucking. The only person who didn’t know was the other Dr. Lee, whose hydrogeology projects out in California kept them apart just long enough for Dr. Lee the paleontologist to engage with his favorite students for some intensive extracurriculars. It didn’t help that Shayna screamed like a banshee in bed.

“I might have you go over and assist her tomorrow. I know you’ve been hard at work over here, but I think her finds should are worthy of pulling you off this side.”

Amaya turned to face her advisor, and flatly said “Of course.” Lee heard what he wanted.

“Good, I’m glad you understand. Try to get these jacketed by tonight, will you,” he said, gesturing to the eroded limb bones in pit seven, “wouldn’t want them to break down any more than they have.”

Amaya agreed, and retrieved her tools.

Even in the early evening, the summer sun beat down hard through a cloudless sky. Heat poured off the green earth below, light glinting off the blue crystals pocking the dig site. With dental picks and a brush at her side, Amaya set to work, exposing the underside of the therapod femur exposed in pit seven. She labored past sunset, prepped and dug and cleaned as she heard her lab around the campfire, heard them crack open cans of beer, and pass around a bottle of Wild Turkey. Crickets sang on the warm clear earth. Their natural rhythm undulating, rising and falling and thrumming with some unseen energy.

The ground under Amaya’s knees seemed to grow only warmer as she cleared rock away. As the air grew cool above her, the pit was hot and wet. A foul, implacable odor hung inside.

Most folks don’t know that fossils smell. Some of rotten eggs, some like a fresh asphalt road on a hot summer day. Pit 7 didn’t smell like either. Pit 7 smelled like electricity, like an old TV the moment it turned off, as static danced about the dying light on the screen, whipping motes of dust into a frenzy.

Below the femur the blue crystals grew more common, filling not just cracks in bone, but every pore of the rock as well. With every scrape of her pick the reek of the pit grew stronger. Blue sand replacing the green dust at the pit floor, until the blue crystal stopped giving way. Amaya scratched at in, and pulled at it, and watched as her picks failed against it. She pulled herself out of the pit, and staggered, her legs asleep and electric, back to the truck, where she retrieved a diamond pick, and a hammer. Chills ran down her arms and legs, as she found the air outside the pit was icy cold, frost creeping up the edges of her windows.

Back in the pit, back in its strange warmth, she scratched again at the deep blue stone beneath her femur. She etched its sides, but still, nothing gave way. With a chisel and a hammer, she threw all the force her body could muster into the stone, and still found no purchase in it.

Amaya threw the hammer aside and swore. _Piece of shit_ , she though to herself, _diamond tipped my ass_. Again, she pulled herself out of the pit, and stumbled back to her truck, and the little nest she made in the bed, beneath a camper shell, beneath the sparse clouds, beneath the cold, dark sky. She tossed and turned all night, her dreams wrought with flashes of blue light, of something falling from the sky, and again, falling up from the earth.

As she often did, Amaya woke in the early morning to the sound of Shayna’s screams. Howling like a coyote. Amaya rolled over, and pressed a pillow over her head, but the damage was done.

The sun rose red in the sky. The late summer air sharp with frost, crackling and crystalline. The soil below, only just humid from the air around it, was frozen hard. Amaya could feel the cold through the soles of her boots. The first Autumn snows were just weeks away. Soon this hill would be buried in shining white.

Amaya emerged from her truck tired, weary arms sore from a night of work. The air around her was stale and cold. Amaya walked past the pit, toward the meal tent. She didn’t pause to look at her work. In Pit Seven the therapod femur was gone. The crystals, last night so blue they almost glowed, almost glowered, were grey, decaying into tiny spars of white at their edges.

Around a folding table, three hungover paleontologists winced at their colleagues screams. One, Henri, stood over the propane camp stove, shaking a stovetop percolator as if it would make the morning’s coffee brew any faster. Finally, the cacophony from Lee’s tents ceased, and the collective willpower of the team not to clap or thank them for finally shutting up was immense.

Jacob, the new masters student, was first to break the heavy silence, “Amaya we missed you at the fire last night.”

Amaya groaned, “Lee needed me to jacket a few things, they fought back.”

“I hate it when the dinosaurs do that. You’d think anything in the ground that long wouldn’t have much fight left in it.”

“Sure.” Amaya knew Jacob had a thing for her. Jacob didn’t know that, as a rule, Amaya did not have a thing for men.

“Well, don’t let him work you too hard, I’d hate for you to—”

“Sorry to break up this rousing conversation,” Henri interjected, “But where is the cooler?” Henri was the only other queer person in the lab, and he watched out for Amaya. She appreciated that, even if she didn’t need it.

“I don’t—I think maybe it was by—” Jacob sputtered, “I think it was at the fire ring.”

“It’s not,” Henri flatly said, “Nor is it in the van where it belongs. Jackson, gear manager! Oy, where’s the cooler.”

Jackson, a fourth year master’s student, who often lamented his thesis that he had written all of 100 words of in the last year, coughed, “Don’t know. Y’all are the ones who move it.”

“And it’s your job to manage it. You get paid for that shit. If you make me eat cold cuts for breakfast, I swear I can and will destroy you.”

Jackson stuck out his tongue. Henri grimaced, and turned back to the coffee, finally perking in the pot. Jackson lit a joint, and wandered off before Lee could see him. Lee complained about folks doing drugs in the field, but he snuck off to smoke with Jackson most nights.

Shayna was the first to emerge from Lee’s tent, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the group, wearing the clothes she wore the night before. A hickey blossomed on her neck. She paused at the flap to her own tent, looking over her shoulder, and smirking as she did. Pretending to be ashamed was part of the game for her. She was marking her territory every bit as much as a dog kicking up dirt after she pees on a tree.

Lee wandered out later, and was the first to pour himself a cup of coffee. He didn’t address the group, nor did he sit with them. He walked directly to pit three, and pulled the tarp off the top of it. He didn’t dig, but he liked to look. He drank his coffee in a single silent gulp, and stared down into the pit, his glasses fogged with the steam of his drink.

“So,” Amaya began, “In absence of our fearless leader, how’re the rocks?”

Henri laughed, “Cold and dead.”

“You’ve got so much in common.”

“Har Har,” he straightened up some, “I’ve been sorting mostly, we’ve got some phalanges from _Brodavis,_ probably from them, anyway. Not confident enough to get a specific ID though. Lots of teeth from pretty much anything you can name, and a bunch of things I won’t even try to identify until I’ve got a computer in front of me.”

“ _Brodavis_ has never been IDed out here before,” Jacob pipped up.

“ _Brodavis_ is known from the upper Hell Creek, Jacob, and we’re looking at rocks that correspond to that age, with several flooding events. Just because they haven’t been found out here doesn’t mean _they_ weren’t.”

“Well—” Jacob began to sputter out his retort, before Amaya cut in.

“I’m sure we can all agree that this assemblage has been strange,” Amaya said, “Nothing here has made sense, so it shouldn’t surprise any of us that we found something else odd here.”

“Has anyone found the meteor yet?” Jackson yelled from the bushes, behind his trickle of smoke.

“If it even was a meteor,” Shayna responded, emerging from her tent, “Raymond, Dr. Lee, told me last night he thinks the ash we’re seeing is from the Absaroka volcanics. For an impact to disrupt the fossil record like we’re seeing here, we’d have seen a trace in the Hell Creek decades ago.”

“If ol’ Ray could sober up for more than three hours a day, he’d remember the Absaroka volcanics erupted in the Eocene,” Jackson quipped, “but then again with all the screaming that seems to follow him around I’m not surprised he can’t hear the crap coming out of his mouth.”

“Fuck you,” Shayna spat.

“And also you,” Jackson smiled now, standing behind his bush, eyes red.

Dr. Lee, at some point during the fray, and returned to the table, “It you all are done, we have work to do. I want the crocodilian in pit three jacketed and removed today. That _Borealosuchus_ may be the most important thing we pull out of the ground this trip. Many thanks to Shayna for her excellent prep work so far.”

Henri leaned to Amaya’s side and whispered, “We’ve got fossils never found in this state, and absolutely bazaar taphonomy, but sure Ray, this crocodile is the most important thing here.”

“Of course it’s important to him. It’s a boney old lizard.”

Henri snorted his coffee, and coughed and laughed, in spite of Dr. Lee’s growing frustration.

In pit three the five students worked in shifts, three in the pit, two outside, working ceaselessly to dig beneath the fossil, trying to preserve just enough matrix to prevent the entire skeleton from falling apart.

As much as Amaya was frustrated to have left her therapod behind, the _Borealosuchus_ was a gorgeous specimen. Fully articulated, despite the level of wear on its individual bones. The black body, still immediately recognizable as a crocodile at least sixty eight million years after its death, was flaked and decayed, pitted with wear. It looked as if it had sat undisturbed for months before burial, a possibility that was all but impossible. Were it not for fossilization of the bones, and their inky black patina, Amaya would have thought they looked like the young, sun-bleached bones laying elsewhere on the desert soil. Unburied and turning to dust under the ever-present light of the sun.

Up on the hillside, and in the walls of the pit, the bright blue of mineral so common through the entire site grew imperceptibly less saturated. Pebbles, and draws of sand tricked down the hillside.

In the pit, Shayna took Amaya’s place, and soon after Henri took Jackson’s place. Jackson first wandered to the cook tent, but, finding that the cooler was indeed missing, he wandered into the surrounding hills to smoke, again.

The blue of the crystals faded ever more. They splintered into white spars, the quiet groan of their failing structure undercut the gentle sound of wind, the clicking of disturbed grasshoppers and screaming of ground squirrels, until finally, in a single sigh of relief, the hillside collapsed.

Dr. Lee was the first to scream, his yell cutting through the mental haze of work. No one could tell what he said, but in an instant Jacob, Henri, and Shayna were scrambling out of the pit, Lee dragging Shayna by her arm so hard that it popped in its socket.

Tons of loose soil, and small rocks collapsed into pit three, and pit two as well. A whole hillside sloughed into the ongoing digs, wrecking lights, burying samples and tools. Jacob, the closest to the toe of the slide, did not avoid the rockfall fully. His leg, buried in dry, hot earth, remained stuck in the pit, his unburied leg emerging at a painful angle from the mess. As he pulled himself free, still dazed from the fray, he lost a boot. His leg, bleeding, but not otherwise harmed, emerged from the pit, and he stumbled forward into a laying position, breathing heavily.

Everyone remained where they were, frozen. Shayna’s face devoid of emotion, eyes glassy still. Henri faced the toe of the slide, quietly laughing, with tears in his eyes. Lee’s face beat red as he mouthed silent expletives. Amaya thought of her undergrad geomorph classes. She remembered her professor, a short little man with coke bottle glasses, who picked his nose when he wrote on the board, apparently unaware that half the class could see. She remembered him, in exquisite detail, from the mustard stain on his tie, to his cheap white sneakers, explaining the different types of landslide, drawing diagrams on the board. This was a translational slide, mass moving along a more-or-less planar surface with minimal rotation. That was not, in that moment, important to understand, but it was all Amaya could think about.

Only one of the paleontologists was moving. Jackson was springing out of the wash he had chosen to smoke or shit, or both, in. His eyes red, and dilated. Black like the eyes of a deer dying on the roadside, pained breaths dragging on in its ruined body. Jackson did not stop to see the slide, he didn’t seem to register it. He was running to his car, a crappy old Subaru. He struggled to get his key into the door, and once inside he struggled to find the ignition.

Dr. Lee was the first to snap out of his daze. “Jackson!” He yelled, his face still red, his placeless anger finally finding its focus, “Jackson what the fuck are you doing.”

Jackson looked up briefly, just as the lab turned to face him. Tears ran down his face, tears and something else. Something black as tar, glistening under the light of his sunroof. He paused only for a moment before hammering his accelerator, and jetting backward without regard for what lay behind him. He drove down the dirt road, away from camp, away from his lab mates.

“God damn it,” Dr. Lee spat, “God damn that useless boy. Fuck.”

The lab did not make a campfire that night. They did not celebrate a hard day’s work. They did not stay up into the wee hours of the morning, watching the moon rise and sink in the sky.

That night, Amaya dreamt again. Her chest was tight, rocks pressing down on her, crushing her body and mind and spirit. She saw the blue light, falling to earth, ruined and tired. Then she saw it again, falling, dripping like water, from the earth above, and down into the yawning black abyss. Blue light screaming down, and around it, one by one, the stars blinked out.

At the first light of day, Amaya woke to Shayna screaming. The rooster of their little band. Amaya wondered why they chose to have sex in the morning. She wondered if Shayna wanted to wake them up, if waking them up was part of the plan for her. The screaming continued, but it was different than the other days. She was taking ragged breaths, and she was getting louder. _No. Not louder_ , Amaya thought, _Closer_.

In an instant she was pounding on the sides of Amaya’s truck, crying, screaming, a ribbon of snot trailing down her nose and into her mouth. “Raymond’s dead,” she yelled between two sobs.

Amaya rose in an instant, and followed Shayna, her feet screaming against the sharp rocks beneath them. Jacob stirred in his tent, Henri was standing outside his, struggling to but boots on. Shayna showed Amaya, and soon Henri, to the hillside, to the toe of the slide, near the now filled pit two. There, she pointed to a pile of dusty bones.

“What the fuck Shayna,” Amaya groaned.

“It’s—” Shayna choked on her words, “His glasses.”

Indeed, near the old weathered skull, splintery and hackly on top of the slide’s toe, there were a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. One lens broken, one lens missing. Amaya sighed again, “I guess they look like his.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shayna yelled, “He’s fucking dead Amaya, those are his glasses.”

“Shayna these bones are old, look at them. I’m sure Dr. Lee is just on a walk or something.”

Shayna sat down on the ground, her flannel shirt slipping down over her shoulder, revealing a terrible black bruise.

Amaya paused. She had never seen Shayna like this, so tired, so empty, so unsure. She looked into the distance, past anything, and anyone, around her. ”Shayna,” Amaya was quiet, struggling to contain her frustration, “You’re hurt. We need to get you to a doctor.”

“But Ray…” she said without looking up.

“Dr. Lee will be fine. Jacob and Henri are still here, when he gets back they can take the van and meet us at the clinic.”

Shayna stood without a word, and began walking toward Amaya’s car. Amaya called Henri over, and they stood over the bones.

When paleontologists find human bones, it’s customary to call the police. A coroner can come out, they can determine the age of the bones, and ensure they are treated with respect. Henri had more experience dealing with that sort of thing than Amaya. When he worked in the southwest his digs were overtopped with archeological sites. He dated a coroner’s assistant for a while, they had a lot of time to get to know each other.

Henri made the call, and waited for the phone to ring. It didn’t. He dialed again, and called again, and again the call wouldn’t go through. Amaya ran to the van, and retrieved their satellite phone. They called again, and again they could not get a response.

Amaya, looking back toward Shayna in her truck, asked Henri to keep trying. He agreed, and whispered a question to Amaya: “Is she okay?”

Amaya paused a moment, her brow furrowed, “I don’t know.”

She walked to her truck, and entered wordlessly. Shayna was shivering in the passenger seat. Amaya placed the key in the ignition, and turned it. She was greeted by complete silence. She turned it again, and again, each turn failing to rouse even the slightest motion in the engine. The truck was quite completely dead.

Amaya was steely calm. “Shayna, we’re going to leave the truck and take the van out, okay.”

Shayna silently agreed, and followed Amaya to the dirty, white, university van. Amaya took the keys out of the gas cap, and tried to start the van. Like the truck, it did not.

Amaya removed herself from the van, and placed the keys back in the gas cap. She did not invite Shayna to get out, but instead opened the hood of the van. She stared into it. She did not know how to repair a van, but she thought it felt like the right thing to do. She didn’t notice another person at her side.

“One of—” Jacob began, interrupted when Amaya pulled away from him, her heart pounding. “One of us should maybe walk to town.” He continued, barely pausing for Amaya to catch her breath.

The boy looked tired. His eyes were dark in their sockets, and blood red. His lips were chapped, almost to the point of bleeding. Patchy stubble covered his face.

Amaya sighed, “I think we need to talk all this out before—”

“I really think one of us should go. I’ll volunteer. We shouldn’t stay here, once we have help, it’ll be easier to figure…to figure out what we should do.”

“Then let’s make a plan, Jacob,” Amaya rested a hand on his shoulder. His shirt was ice cold, and he had sweat through it overnight.

Amaya called the group together, and they sat down at the fire ring. They sat in silence for a time, listening to the wind. The grasshoppers and cicadas had all fallen silent, as if they had vanished.

“So,” Amaya began, “In absence of our fearless leader, what are we doing?”

“Fuck you,” Shayna whispered. Amaya opted not to hear.

“I think you’re asking the wrong question Amaya. What the fuck is going on here is what I want to know,” Henri was tense, watching the hills, not offering the lab more than an instant of eye contact. “Where the hell is Raymond?”

“He’s not here,” Amaya said flatly, “he chose to wonder off, he walked to town, I don’t know. He made a choice though, and we need to worry about ourselves right now.”

“One of us should walk to town, like I said, it’s our best—”

“More than one of us should walk,” Shayna interjected, “whatever happened to Ray could happen to one of us.”

“Then two of us!” Jacob yelped, “All of us, I don’t know, but we should go get help.”

“A bear,” Amaya whispered.

“Pardon?” Shayna laughed.

“Rural Montana, the cooler vanished. It’s probably a habituated bear. It took our food, spooked Jackson. Maybe it forced Dr. Lee away from camp overnight. It would make sense.”

“No bear tracks though,” Henri said, his voice quiet, “And that wouldn’t explain the slide.”

“Landslides happen, Henri.”

“This…” Henri shook his head, “this feels different. The rocks are…Amaya have you seen how they change color.”

“What?” Amaya and Shayna responded in unison.

“Watch the hills. That bit of white, watch,” Henri pointed toward the dark green stones of the hillside. Faintly, almost impossible to see with the naked eye, the white parch of stone flashed blue. Pebbles of the odd blue mineral seemed a tiny bit more saturated, more full of life. Then, in time, they faded.

“It’s the light,” Amaya scoffed.

“I don’t think it is. I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t think it’s the light. And that smell—”

“Jacob?” Shayna stood with a start. Henri and Amaya turned to see Jacob hobbling on his injured leg toward the van. “Jacob where are you going?”

He didn’t answer. He was shaking with chills, shaking with tears. He did not turn as he walked behind the van.

“Jacob,” Henri focused back on the camp, away from the crystals and the hills, “Jacob come on, we need to think about this.”

Henri followed Jacob behind the Van, and stopped hard. He stood, quiet, and rested his head in his hands.

“Henri?” Amaya asked, just loud enough for her friend to here.

“He’s gone. He must have run. He’s fast. God damn it.”

The lab mates sat at the edge of the fire ring, and without communicating the desire to do so, they all set to building a fire within it.

One by one they peeled off to attend to little tasks. Amaya covered pit seven with a tarp, and weighed it down with stones. Some time later Henri started to break down tents, and throw them into the back of the van. Shayna, after hours choking back tears, found a tarp to cover the human bones at the toe of the slide. She staked off the corners and edges with flags, and covered the entirety with a thin layer of dirt and stones.

In the distance, far to the east, a plume of smoke rose from a wildfire. Thick billowing clouds, pouring up and out of the hills and mountains. Amaya could see jets flying over, unloading their water and fire retardant, and flying off. One by one, pecking away at a fundamental force of nature. Powerless in each passing moment, but enough, maybe, to slow the fire’s advance.

As the sun hung slow in the air, after hours of quiet, Amaya broke the silence.

“Shayna,” her voice creaked from disuse, “Did you really feel something for Dr. Lee?”

Shayna looked up, her face dancing, darting between expressions, “I don’t know. I don’t think he really felt anything about me though. I know he didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Henri looked up from the fire.

“I don’t…I don’t think you should be. He was…” Shayna threw back her head, and looked into the sky, “We both got something out of it. My second semester things we’re going well. I don’t remember which of us made the first move.”

“I don’t think that made it okay,” Amaya looked to her colleague.

“For which one of us?”

Amaya paused, “I don’t know what you were going through Shayna. Lee shouldn’t have used that against you.”

“Maybe.” Shayna paused, as if she had something more to say, but it never came.

As night fell, even the wind grew silent. A night devoid of insects, even the tiniest mosquito or gnat. A night devoid of wind, of rustling plants. The crackling of fire, and the occasional moment of conversation was the only sound to be heard. Yet, in instants, spaced out by hours, Henri, Shayna, and Amaya each found themselves jumping as they saw shapes moving in the distance. Something crept through the dying brush, something silent, something all but devoid of form. Something that hung electric in the air and smelled of thunderstorms and broken radios and powerlines.

The lab mates didn’t mention any of this to each other, and each chose, however petrified with fear they were in those instants, to keep what they saw to themselves. They were silent, frozen. All three of them.

Amaya tended the fire, quietly ensuring it stayed hot and bright.

Henri held a postcard from town on his lap, and a pen in his hand. He wrote a name at the top of it. _Charles_ , he began, but he could not find what words to write.

Shayna fidgeted, trying to find a way to rest her body that didn’t send electric pain through her shoulder. She watched the stars, the Milky Way blossoming across them.

Jacob sat in silence. Unnoticed by his peers, until, all at once, they saw him.

“Jacob?!” Amaya yelled, “Where the fuck have you been?”

He looked ill. His skin milk white, his cheeks hollow. In the dark of night his eyes looked black.

“Kiddo you need water,” Henri sputtered, standing from his place at the fire, “It was a bonehead move running off without your pack like that.”

Shayna was silent, looking at him, through him. She was shaking. She saw the blue crystals in the pits regain their color, and glimmer like stars in the hillsides.

Henri returned to Jacob with a bottle of water, which he held in his outstretched arm. Jacob wordlessly took the bottle, but did not open it.

“Buddy you need to drink, little sips now, you seem pretty far gone. Are you bleeding?”

Jacob looked down. His shirt was covered in patches of black, no, midnight blue crust. Some spots still wet, others like scabs, dry and flaking. Henri sat beside the boy, and reached to open the water bottle. Jacob did not respond, but, as their limbs intertwined, something did.

Shayna screamed, Amaya froze. Jacob, the thing that wasn’t Jacob, unfolded, and closed around Henri. Where once two men were sitting, there remained only Jacob. It looked down toward the ground, and then up at the two women, sitting across from it at the fire. Amaya did not move, but with all the force and clarity she could not muster that morning, Shayna began to shout and throw rocks at the creature. Jacob stood, and took a single halting step, flying forward and up into the hills as if the act of stepping, and the act of moving were related, but not connected in any way. In another instant the figure of Jacob seemed to be running, flying sideways, smashing and unfolding over the front of the van, where it rested, open like a stingray across the hood, but still, somehow, impossibly, Jacob. An arm, a stingray’s poison barb, a bear’s claw, a wretched tentacle, all of those at once, and more, and nothing, a blue fire, swung out from the van, and Shayna threw a rock hammer at it, and flinched as she heard the glass break. Jacob’s face, which was now Dr. Lee’s face seemed to smile.

Shayna pulled a log from the fire, her hand sizzling, and threw it at the thing.

Amaya blinked, and she was moving. Running toward the rising moon. She heard something scream in the distance. Something terrible, something awful in the truest sense of the word. Amaya ran as her throat grew dry and screamed in pain. She ran as her muscles seized and felt as if they were tearing apart. She ran as tears streamed down her face until even those dried to salt.

Amaya blinked again, and she was in a wash, her face against the cool earth. Her legs screaming in acidic pain, her heart grinding like a freight train flying off the tracks. Her mind clear. Every attempt at even the smallest though lost immediately in the white hot energy inside her. She fell, against all odds, asleep.

She had the dream again. Blue light, falling, tearing apart in the sky. Dim, dying. It crashes to earth, surrounded by strange beasts. They fall apart as it reaches out. It sinks into the soil, then the stone. Then, in a flash, it burns again. It’s falling again, from the earth, trickling up, burning with blue heat. It falls, and falls, and the stars dim, one by one, but they do not die. The fire glows weak, its stream thready and faint, until it falls apart. The stars burn white hot, and the blue flame fades.

The sun rose red and silent in the sky. Amaya stood in the wash, pebbles stuck to her face. Her shins bruised and bleeding. Without word or pause, without even a moment to collect herself, she began to walk back toward the dig site. With the sun rising behind her, she trudged to the hill, towards where she thought the hill was. It was faded in her mind. She didn’t know what happened, she didn’t know what would greet her at the dig site. She feared that her friends would be there, worried for her, hungover around the campfire, laughing, talking shit. They weren’t. There wasn’t anything there. No truck, no van. No fire ring. No lab mates. A crescent moon scarp hung on the hillside below the setting moon. Green rock, topped by brown soil, covered everything.

She walked up the edge, up the toe of the slide, and sat down atop it. She silently pushed the dirt there back and forth, and just below the surface lay a thin later of glassy black ash, flecked with blue, fading to white in the sun.

With the morning sun in her eyes, Amaya Zigor turned away from the toe of the landslide, and walked toward town. Her heart raced in her chest, her thoughts raced in her head, two pounding forces compounding into ceaseless, pointless noise. She listened as the little clicking grasshoppers returned to the ground below her feet. She watched as dead sparse shrubs gave way to sagebrush, dry, but alive.

Amaya did not flinch when she tripped and slammed her knee into a stone on the walk down. She did not cry when the though of her lab mates passed through her mind. Through the cacophony, all she knew was that she was hungry.

In town Amaya found the little diner still open for breakfast. She stepped in, and the server yelled “Sit wherever you want dear, I’ll be right with you.”

She sat in a booth by the window, and she called the department head at the university.

“Dr. Jones, hi ma’am. There’s been an accident. A landslide. They’re all gone. Please…send help.”

Amaya placed her phone at the edge of the table, and grabbed a menu from its other end. She ordered a stack of pancakes, but she never ate a bite.

About an hour north of Billings there was once a glacier full of grasshoppers. Rocky Mountain Locusts, the scourge of the west, in their time. Hungry, wretched things that could eat the cotton shirt off a man’s back as he ran for cover. There was a time that they roamed unabated across the Rockies, and devoured all that they could find. Then, without a trace, they vanished.

About an hour north of Billings a glacier melted. Scores of creatures trapped within the ice quickly rotted as they fell from their icy tomb. Free, finally, but only for a moment. Gone. All but forgotten.


End file.
